US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping stand near the “Temple of Heaven” in Beijing, China, in May 2026. At their meeting, Xi reportedly raised the idea of the “Thucydides Trap” with Trump. (The White House)

Enough About the ‘Thucydides Trap’ Already

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The Thucydides Trap assumes nations have no control over their actions, and has been refuted by world history. Yet fear of it in popular imagination can have real geopolitical impact.

Statesmen the world over, I am begging you: Do not ground your foreign policy or strategy in the “Thucydides Trap.” Harvard professor Graham Allison coined the metaphor after reviewing a sample of historical cases when an aspiring “hegemon,” the predominant power in a regional or global system, squared off against the reigning one. It’s a riff on the Greek historian Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, his classic chronicle of great-power war in ancient Greece. Professor Allison concludes that, now as in antiquity, great-power war is likelier than not when rivalry ensues—hence the title of his book Destined for War (2014).

Back in 2018, I chaired a panel on the Thucydides Trap at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. I led off by asking Allison whether the Thucydides Trap is a steel trap or a sand trap. If caught in it, in other words, can the contenders play their way out? Allison said it’s a steel trap. There’s no escape. Hence the word Destined.

But be wary of claims that some factor is “destiny” in international affairs. And it’s not just the Thucydides Trap. A good rule is to think twice before accepting claims deriving from articles or books you suspect few in authority actually read. Elite and popular discourse has a way of reducing a complex concept to sloganeering or a bumper sticker. For instance, misinterpretation of Francis Fukuyama’s treatise on The End of History (1992) did lasting damage to American statecraft. Fukuyama was not prophesying that diplomatic and military history had literally ended, and thus that martial affairs were passé with the Soviet Union’s demise. And yet an extreme form of that claim seeped directly into—and distorted—the making of US diplomacy and strategy in those heady days. Economic globalization, we were told, was going to sweep the globe while geopolitics faded into irrelevance. Why prepare to fight a foe that will never emerge?

We in the US armed forces are still struggling to rebuild from our partial disarmament following the End of History—and this at a time when the next challenger, Communist China, is on the march. So caveat emptor with regard to big ideas. They can mislead even as they instruct.

What the “Thucydides Trap” Idea Gets Right

Don’t get me wrong. There is merit to the Thucydides Trap. Allison is onto a real force in affairs of state. But it is only one among many forces.

Just review what martial sage Carl von Clausewitz says about the “climate” of politics and warfare. The Thucydides Trap drastically oversimplifies the Clausewitzian tumult of international interactions, making Allison’s........

© The National Interest